#11: Why You Need To Ask Your Visitors For Their Email Addresses
Published on 18 August 2010 under
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of my most favourite topics. I’ve been involved in email marketing for the past five years and have tested practically everything there is to test about it.
It still amazes me, though, how many estate agents don’t really understand the true benefit of email marketing and the constant need to capture the email addresses of visitors to their websites.
Marketing to an email list is not about spamming people with a load of properties for sale every week. It’s about building a relationship with those people who over time will become your customers or recommend you to others. It’s one of the most powerful marketing techniques online today yet so many struggle to understand how to make it work for them.
It all begins with asking your visitors for their email address in return for something.
Looking Back
Let’s wind the clock back four years (you’ll know by now that I quite like to do this!). Back then I was going all out optimising my websites, getting links, email addresses, everything. I was obsessed with getting my websites to the top of Google. It was great fun (I am a geek) and very financially rewarding. The more I did, the better they ranked and the more money I made.
Then one day I upset Google. They’d had enough of me and kicked out my biggest website from their search results. Traffic, revenue and fun ended that morning when I woke up to find I was nowhere in Google. My heart sank, my head hit the desk and I seriously doubted whether I was as good at all this stuff as I thought I was.
But, being an engineer by professional and never seeing problems, only solutions, I decided to pick my head up off the desk, sort out the website and start emailing my subscriber list a lot more.
Up until that point I hadn’t sent out very many newsletters, maybe just one per month if I felt like it! So I started sending content packed newsletters out every week. My subscribers loved it, they couldn’t get enough of my newsletters. Nobody was doing anything like it and I was inundated with so much positive feedback.
The regular newsletter brought a ton of people back to my website every week and I was able to generate enough revenue from it to keep me going whilst I tried to get my website back into Google’s search results, which I managed to do after six months of full-on effort...but that’s another story!
When all this happened to me I was truly saved by the fact that I’d at least made a half-hearted attempt to collect emails from my website visitors from very early on. When Google kicked me out I had over 5,000 people on my email list, today I have over 17,000 on it. If Google kicks me out again I should be ok!
It’s Not Really About Google
This isn’t really what email lists are for. They aren’t supposed to be for getting you out of trouble. The idea is that you use your email list to build a relationship with your customers and potential customers, thereby generating sales and revenue.
In the rest of this tutorial I am going to explain how to capture email addresses in the most effective way, how to use them to best effect, why you should use double opt-ins, where to host your list and how not be black flagged as a spammer.
Let’s make you some money with your email list. Read on...
You need to be logged in to read the rest of the tutorial.
If you haven't registered yet then please click here to join now.
Add your own comments